PETER I. ROSE was born in Rochester, New York, in 1933. He received an A.B from Syracuse University in 1954 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1959. He is Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology and Senior Fellow of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College and a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University. It is apt that he has been chosen for this honor since he was a former student of Robin Williams and helped create this Lectureship in Robin Williams’ honor when Peter, himself, was President of the ESS.

Smith College has been his academic base since 1960, but he has spent considerable time off-campus in the U.S. and abroad in a variety of teaching and research positions. A frequent lecturer at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, from which he received the University Medal in 1994, he also served as Fulbright Professor and Fulbright Senior Specialist.

He is best known for his book They and We (Random House 1964; Paradigm Publishers, 7th – and 50th anniversary edition, 2014), he is also the author of The Subject is Race (Oxford University Press, 1967), Strangers in Their Midst (Richwood Press, 1977), Mainstream and Margins(Transaction Books, 1983), Tempest-Tost (Oxford University Press, 1997), Guest Appearances and Other Travels inTime and Space (Swallow Press, 2003), With Few Reservations (iUniverse, 2010) and Postmonitions of a Peripatetic Professor (Levellers Press, 2013). He has co-authored and edited many other volumes and he has published a number of scholarly and “extracurricular” articles and over 200 reviews and review essays in sociology and history journals.

Professor Rose has long been active in academic organizations. President of the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS) in the early 1990s, he was also the first president of the Massachusetts Sociological Society. Earlier he served as vice president of the ESS and of the national Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), as a member of the Council of the American Sociological Association, and on the editorial boards of Races and Nations, The Journal of Refugee Studies, and New Community. From 1965-1980 he was Consulting Editor in Sociology at Random House/Knopf and was principal consultant to Time-Life Books for its 14 volume series, Human Behavior. He was also consultant and advisor to a number of other publishers as well as to private and governmental agencies in the U.S. and abroad on issues of desegregation, refugee policy, international scholarly exchanges, and higher education.